We Are The Moral Animals

Why is it that of all the big ideas in the history of science, none of them create as much discomfort, and even disgust, as Darwin's idea of evolution?

The answer is that Darwin's evolutionary account of human nature appears to subvert morality in ways that most people find repulsive. This popular repugnance is an understandable reaction to a mistaken interpretation of what a Darwinian science of human nature says about morality.

In one of his early notebooks, written in 1838, Darwin wrote: "Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity, more humble, and I believe true, to consider him created from animals."

There it is. That's what people most fear about Darwin. Human beings are not created by God in His Image and thus set above the rest of the natural world. Rather, human beings are "created from animals."

And if they are just animals, they would seem to have no special dignity or worth. They are born; they live; they die. Any belief that human beings have some transcendent moral purpose would seem to be nonsense. The only morality that would seem to follow from this bleak Darwinian view is a hedonistic morality devoted to satisfying one's animal appetites.

Nancy Pearcey--a creationist opponent of Darwinian evolution--likes to quote a line from a rock music song by the Bloodhound Gang that captures the base lifestyle implicated by this view: "You and me, baby, ain't nothin' but mammals. So let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel."

If we teach Darwinian science to our children, Pearcey warns, then we should expect that, once they see that they are only evolved mammals, they will throw out all traditional morality and act like brute animals.

So how should the defenders of evolution respond to this fear of Darwinian morality? Oddly enough, many of them share this fear, and so they try to protect morality from the influence of Darwinian science by insisting on a strict separation between moral values and scientific facts.

Biologist Thomas Huxley was one of Darwin's closest friends and supporters. And yet he was disturbed by what seemed to be the immorality of Darwinian evolution through a "struggle for existence"--one that would result in a Hobbesian war of all against all.

Morality cannot be rooted in evolved human nature, Huxley argued, because of the unbridgeable gulf between the selfishness of our natural inclinations and the selflessness of our moral duties. As the only rational and cultural animals, human beings must suppress their evolved natural desires and enter a transcendent realm of pure moral duty.

Today, some evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins have adopted Huxley's position. In our moral life, Dawkins has declared, "we are entitled to throw out Darwinism, to say we don't want to live in a Darwinian world."

But to assume, as Huxley and Dawkins do, that a Darwinian world would be an immoral world contradicts Darwin's own understanding of his work. In The Descent of Man, published in 1871, Darwin explained the moral sense as rooted in evolved human nature.

He showed how human evolution favored kinship, mutuality and reciprocity as grounds for cooperation that would be enforced by moral emotions such as love, gratitude, indignation and guilt.

"Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment," Darwin concluded, "originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit."

A lot of recent research confirms Darwin's evolutionary account of morality. Zoologists like Frans de Waal have shown that many of the elements of moral behavior can be found in chimpanzees and other animals closely related to human beings.

Evolutionary theorists such as David Sloan Wilson have shown that goodness can evolve, because groups of individuals with good traits can survive and reproduce better than competing groups. Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have shown that the human morality is rooted in specific parts of the brain that are adapted for moral emotions and moral judgments.

We have nothing to fear from such scientific probing into the biological grounds of morality. On the contrary, we should welcome this as showing us how deeply rooted morality is for creatures like us.

Our morality is not just a product of individual taste or cultural preference. Rather, our moral striving is as much of a natural necessity for us as breathing and eating. We are the moral animals.